The idea of being someone else

My conversation with Steven Richards

Balsamo

Steven and I talked about his experience identifying as trans, how his new beliefs about gender unraveled, and his love of writing of fiction.

EM: You’ve talked about how this belief system felt like a virus running in your brain and the community reinforced people’s identities and squelched doubts. So I’m curious, how did you start to come out of this belief system?

SAR: That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t have an answer—I have theories. For the last few years that I identified as trans, I spent a lot of time trying to ‘solve’ the ideology. It became an obsession for me for a while. I was reading about the ideology of gender—and also about anarchism, because I was friends with a bunch of queer anarchists. I was trying to sort out in my head how all the things I believed could possibly be true at once, and I wasn’t able to solve that. I kept hitting a point where it all just didn’t make sense anymore.

Then there was the physiological side of things. I was put on antidepressants at 13 and was on one medication after another from age 13 to 23, when I decided I didn’t want to take these medications forever. I wanted to see if I could do without that. My psychiatrist wasn’t very cooperative, and warned me that it was bad for people to go off medications in winter, so why not wait till summer? I didn’t want to wait, so I ended up just stopping antidepressants cold turkey. I started feeling like myself again, which I hadn’t in a long time. I felt more of a connection to my body and I thought, Oh, I remember feeling this way. I had sort of found the feeling I had been trying to find with the transition. That thing I had been looking for was there again. So I think being medicated at a young age played a role.

Between the mental and physiological changes, at some point, I sort of snapped. The immediate feeling I had wasn’t I made a horrible mistake transitioning, I’m actually a man. Instead, it felt like I made a choice. I said to myself, I don’t think transitioning is ever going to make me happy, it’s not going to make me more genuine or more me. Transitioning is just a thing I did and I can either choose to live as a transwoman or I can detransition and live as a man. If both of those are valid options, I’d rather live as a man. 

After I made that choice, I moved out of the ideology. My thinking changed. More and more, I began to realize it was a messed up situation, a messed up thing I’ve done to my body. Now I’m here and I’ve been writing about this because I don’t think anybody should be doing it to themselves. I definitely don’t think it’s medical care. But that was a long process. There was no one moment.

EM: When did that process of questioning the beliefs you’d adopted and questioning your decision to transition start?

SAR: I was 21 when I started trying to ‘solve’ the ideology. It was after I’d had my orchiectomy. I was experiencing pain after the surgery—frayed nerves.  It was unpleasant. When I got the surgery, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, Oh, I’m having a body part removed and there are going to be complications that go along with that. That’s because I didn’t feel like my sex organs were part of my body. I felt like they were attached to me, but that they weren’t really me. So I felt like having them removed wouldn’t do anything. It was magical thinking. I was basically delusional about this and that delusion was encouraged by the community and the medical establishment and all of my friends. Actually having to live with the reality of surgery made me realize I was inhabiting a real human body.

I think what really started me thinking was realizing that I didn’t have the option to go off hormones anymore—that if, for some reason, I lost my health insurance or there was some kind of medical supply-chain issue and I wasn’t able to access estrogen, I’d have serious health complications. That was somehow something I hadn’t thought about before the surgery and something that no doctors or therapists ever talked to me about. When I realized that, it really freaked me out. That was what sent me over the edge into two years of obsessively questioning and trying to solve the ideology and trying to figure out a way that it would all make sense, trying to figure out a way that what had happened was OK. And I couldn’t figure it out.

Read the rest at Genspect!